Empirical Investigation of Hausa Dialect Intelligibility Among Speakers from Different Geopolitical Zones

Hausa is spoken across a vast geographical area extending from Kano through Sokoto, Bauchi, Gombe, Yobe, and Borno states, and significant regional dialect variation has been documented, raising questions about the degree of mutual intelligibility between speakers from geographically distant dialect areas. This study empirically investigates Hausa dialect intelligibility among speakers from different Nigerian geopolitical zones, testing the degree to which speakers of Kano, Sokoto, Bauchi, and Maiduguri Hausa varieties understand each other. A psycholinguistic intelligibility testing design was employed, administering a battery of listening comprehension, vocabulary recognition, and sentence interpretation tasks using recorded stimuli from speakers of four regional Hausa varieties to 200 participants drawn equally from each dialect area. The intelligibility battery covered conversational, narrative, and formal register stimuli. Participants also completed metalinguistic awareness tasks probing their ability to identify unfamiliar dialect features. Findings document high but not complete mutual intelligibility between all tested variety pairs, with the greatest intelligibility challenges arising in the Kano-Maiduguri comparison, where lexical differences are most pronounced. Formal register shows higher cross-dialect intelligibility than conversational register, suggesting that formal Hausa functions as a shared standard despite significant vernacular divergence. Regional vocabulary differences are the primary source of comprehension breakdown, while phonological differences create comprehension challenges only in rapid conversational speech. The study contributes the first empirical intelligibility measurement data for regional Hausa varieties and has direct implications for standardisation policy. Keywords: Hausa dialects, Mutual intelligibility, Geopolitical zones, Psycholinguistics, Dialect variation.